The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My personal experience with mild-moderate depression are quite different.
It manifests as an utter lack of energy and clear anhedonia. I do occasionally feel great angst about certain things (my ADHD, my inelegibilty to give the USMLE as of this moment), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that self-pity is the defining factor.
I was having occasional suicidal ideation a few weeks back, but thankfully I still love and respect myself enough to never indulge them. It's more like intrusive thoughts than something I really want to do.
It does sounds like we have different experiences of depression. I might call mine more neurotic or distressed than what you've described. I appreciate your reply because it's making me think I'd probably rephrase my original post to add a few more qualifiers. It might reinforce my thought that depression is an analysis of a set of behaviors over time rather than a direct emotional experience. I revisited the depression symptoms list and it seems to me that a really wide range of causes could result in a subset of those symptoms.
I feel like my cause is very much a cultural learned behavior resulting out of a kind of toxic shame mindset, which I think is common, and I feel like I see it in a lot of depression communities, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be universal.
You have my sympathies, and I can only hope you recover on your own or find a treatment that works.
I'm hopeful that ketamine therapy, which I can get in the UK, might work. There's also ECT, but it causes some degree of memory loss, which scares me off it for now
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